Just to leave something more written on this page:
OF COURSE you can either use an older Distro (version or just discontinued) to run old hardware, but there lies the same issue as using Windows 7 in this day & age.
An alternative may be a Distro with no human-friendly UI (basically Arch used as DOS) and launching applications from the terminal (as my IGNORANT self is just making things up right now, to brainstorm) so that having older drivers wouldn’t hurt performance (by “desktop” use or “gaming” use).